Totally Frank

Nine months after he walked out of a psychiatric hospital following his breakdown, Frank Bruno is still struggling to come to terms with life away from the ring. In this remarkably candid interview with Kevin Mitchell he talks for the first time about his fragile mental health, the pain of divorce and how his love for his children keeps him going and helps to lighten the darkness.

The last time I met Frank Bruno was in a gym in the suburbs of Las Vegas eight years ago. He was the heavyweight champion of the world and it was three days before he was to have the last of his 45 professional fights. He had been champion for six months. Soon he would be very much an ex-champ. Within five months he would retire from boxing. What happened in the troubled times after that is partly why we have arranged to meet again.

On that day in March 1996, I thought I would sneak a look at Bruno's preparation for his return with Mike Tyson. I arrived early and chatted with Wayne McCullough, the Belfast fighter who had moved to Vegas to train with the great Eddie Futch. Frank was unusually edgy, McCullough said. He had banned all writers from his workouts, even the Sun, the paper to whom he had been closest during his 14 years as a pro. I was pushing my luck.

'Keep your head down,' said McCullough, 'and he might not notice you.' Futch, 84 at the time, turned to his beautiful young Swedish fiancée, Eva, and laughed softly. 'Frank's got to loosen up or he'll get knocked out.'

It might have been a line from one of his pantomime appearances, so unthreatening was it. What I didn't know, what few but his closest friends and associates knew, was that Bruno's ability to make light of even the serious business of boxing was disguising deeper personal concerns.

I shook his hand, wished him well and left. I felt uneasy about the fight, for reasons that had little to do with boxing. Bruno was taking the short end of the purse, for a start, even though he was champion. This didn't greatly please him or his wife, Laura, but it was the deal he had struck to have a crack at the title in the first place.

As well as the wrangles over money, there was an air of foreboding at every press conference, with Laura turning into a particularly vocal cheerleader for her man. Some of her language was less than diplomatic. Meanwhile, Tyson's people prowled town like vultures.

Frank Warren, who promoted many of Bruno's fights, including this one, recalls the strange atmosphere moments before Bruno would walk to the ring, crossing himself 'like the Pope on speed', as Warren put it. 'He looked so up for it in the dressing room,' Warren told me. 'I turned to the others and said, "I think we've got a result here." Then there was a knock on the door to tell us to go to the ring and it was like someone had put a pin in him. He was totally deflated.'

Futch was right. Warren's worst fears were realised. In less than nine minutes, Tyson separated Bruno from his senses, his title and his wilting sense of self-worth.

Eight years on, May 2004. We are waiting for Bruno at a place called Kids Company, an innovative project for excluded and disturbed teenagers in a back street in south-east London. He is late. The kids, most of them hyperactive and loud, are growing impatient. Bruno arrives, a loose-fitting shirt hanging on his still considerable frame outside black slacks. Since we last met, he has lost weight and picked up baggage of an entirely different kind.

'Kicked you out of the gym, did I?' he says, struggling to recall our meeting in Vegas. 'Sorry about that. Hope it didn't cause any offence. Very sorry.'

There follows an extraordinary Pied Piper sequence as Bruno looks around the school and the kids look around Bruno, touching his fists and admiring his gold watch. 'Hey Frank, take our picture,' they say. 'Speak to my mate on the phone, Frank. Can I give you a punch? Broono! Broono!'

He moves serenely through the throng, pausing only to give one cheeky customer a long stare, followed by the deepest laugh in town. A skinny kid burrows his way under Bruno's arm and tells him he's going to be a fighter. 'Tough old game,' he tells the youngster, 'tough old game.'

Bruno does a lot of charity work and his visit to Camberwell is part of his commitment to Sport Relief, for whom he will run one mile, along with fellow celebrities, on 10 July. As we walk around the school, Bruno's attention is drawn to a poem scribbled on the wall. It starts: 'My mind is a useless pit/Where nothing stays and nothing sits.' He stares intently at the words. Kids Company is at the business end of the charity jamboree. The people who work here are thrilled to be receiving some of the £4million that Sport Relief expects to raise. Bruno is happy to help: for the kids and, you guess, for himself. His life has purpose again.

Later, he plays basketball with some of the boys and, after an hour of shaking hands, dodging flying pillows and general chaos, we barricade ourselves in the kitchen to talk about what has happened to him since that fight eight years ago.

On 22 September last year Bruno was admitted to a psychiatric hospital near his home in Essex. He was there for nearly a month. He had become isolated and confused; there were reports that he had been sleeping in a boxing ring in his garden, the same ring in which he had won his world title, and directing traffic outside his house.

Dean Powell, a trainer and promoter, remembers meeting Bruno at a boxing show in Dagenham shortly before he was admitted to hospital. 'I've known Frank since he trained at the Royal Oak [in Canning Town] and he'd always been Mr Jolly. That's the Bruno people know. But that day he was very quiet and he seemed nervous. He'd lost quite a lot of weight.'

When I ask Bruno about what happened on that September day, he says: 'I didn't want to go to the hospital at first. But, when I looked at it realistically, it was the right place to go to. They know their business but, yes, I did resent it when I first went there.'

Does he know what tipped him over into serious depression?

'I don't know... I don't know if it was all part of my frustration. I went through a rocky patch. I'd got divorced and I don't think I took it too well. Then there was the nervous breakdown. I went in that place for a month and when I came out, I was OK... a little bit rocky here and there with the medication I've had to take. But you just come through it the best you can, know what I mean?'

He acknowledges that he hurt those closest to him but, equally, he is determined to repair the damage, to his relationships and to himself. 'I went through a rough time but I'm fine now. I've got three beautiful kids. Some people don't know how to handle what happened to me, some people do. I did have a nervous breakdown and some people do have these illnesses. I'm no different from anyone else.'

That was the hardest reality for Bruno to accept: that he was no different from anyone else. All his adult working life he had been a product, wrapped up and presented to the public. It took time for him to accept that celebrity could not shield him from the bruises everyone takes.

Warren, who always had a special affection for Bruno, saw him the day he left hospital. 'I spoke to him about what happened,' he says. 'He admitted he'd been smoking marijuana and taking anti-depressants. That contributed a lot to it. Also, there were only a couple of people around him who would tell him what was happening but he didn't want to listen. I contacted Al Hamilton [an old friend of the Bruno family] and they got in touch with Laura. That was important.

'Then he was talking a lot about fighting again, so I kidded him into applying for his licence, so it would at least get him back in training again, to take his mind off his troubles. Frank was completely out of touch with reality at that point. He came over to my house a few times and I could tell he was still paranoid. I think that came from his early days in the game when [Mickey] Duff and [Terry] Lawless told him not to trust anybody.

'He lacked self-esteem. When people said cruel things about him, they hurt, things like he was a big dummy of a heavyweight. But Frank was a much better fighter than people give him credit for. He beat the man who beat the man who beat the man, don't forget. He beat Oliver McCall, who'd beaten Larry Holmes and knocked out Lennox Lewis.'

Bruno was often derided for his oak-tree stiffness in the ring, but he worked on his movement and few who were on the end of them would deny that his jab and right-cross were as lethal as any in the heavyweight division. His stamina could let him down, but that was no surprise when you looked at the amount of muscle he carried in the ring. No, by any standards, (certainly those of today), Bruno was a pretty good fighter - and a legitimate heavyweight champion of the world. 'That was the greatest night of my life,' he says now of his victory over Oliver 'Atomic Bull' McCall at Wembley in the autumn of 1995.

Franklyn Roy Bruno weighed 9lb when born in Hammersmith Hospital in 1961. He grew at a predictably fast rate until, at the age of 11, after he had hit a teacher at school in Wandsworth, he was sent to Oak Hill, a special reform boarding school in Sussex, to have a few of the edges knocked off. 'It was very tough at Oak Hill, but you had to get used to it,' he says. 'I think I needed that experience, as these kids here do. If I'd stayed in London, I'd have been in a lot bigger trouble, I'm sure.'

He left Oak Hill at the age of 16, took up the boxing he had started as an eight-year-old and became the youngest ever Amateur Boxing Association heavyweight champion at 18. When he turned professional that year, his connections told anyone who would listen that he would be the first British world heavyweight champion in a hundred years. Before he could be licensed, however, he was flown to Bogotá, Colombia, to have retina damage repaired. The pressure on him had already started.

Under the management of Lawless and Duff, aided by their associates, Jarvis Astaire and Mike Barrett, and supported by the Sun and the BBC, Bruno was expertly packaged from the start. He was a natural performer: he had little trouble playing the big south London kid with the big south London punch because that's what he was. And yet he was huggable. Women, children and pensioners adored him. So did an army of punters longing for a British heavyweight champion.

He began with a series of comfortable knockout wins against mediocre opponents, specially imported, in front of big audiences at the Royal Albert Hall and Wembley. There was an early wobble against Jumbo Cummings and then a devastating defeat by another American who was not expected to upset the plans, James 'Bonecrusher' Smith. His management team thought about ending it right there but, given the commercial opportunities, set about rebuilding Bruno's career.

By now, the feisty white girl Bruno had met at a south London ice rink as a teenager in 1980 was starting to have a greater say in the running of his career. Laura Mooney bargained hard with Duff and Lawless, who were not used to being dictated to, least of all by a woman.

Bruno challenged for the world title four times. On the first occasion, against Tim Witherspoon, he was stopped at Wembley while leading on points; Tyson destroyed him in five; Lennox Lewis trailed on points but stopped him in seven in Cardiff. And then, at last, he hung on against McCall. It was some journey, and Laura was there for him all the way, shouting at ringside and at the negotiating table.

Yet it all began to unravel before that March engagement with Tyson in 1996. Nothing went right. Laura was particularly unhappy in Vegas, arguing that co-promoter Don King was giving Tyson favourable treatment, the bigger apartment in the MGM Grand and generally stacking the cards against her Frank.

'That whole week had been out of control,' says Warren, 'especially with Laura, who was shouting and swearing at the weigh-in. But we had taken that fight with Tyson to get the earlier fight with McCall. That was the deal. And who knew what Tyson would turn up?'

Bruno admits he was in turmoil before the fight. 'You always have apprehension going into a fight,' he says. 'The dressing room can be a very hard place to be, going up to the ring can be a very hard place, but you condition your mind to do whatever you've got to do. But I wasn't mentally right for that fight. So, yes, there could have been a little bit of fear, or so many other things. Yes, fear was in me, but natural fear... I can't really go into what was going through my mind at the time, but I wasn't right. I was only 10 per cent fit for that fight.'

His voice trails away. 'When I came home, I think I realised then it was time to call it a day. I'd been in the game long enough, I'd done what I had to do. And, to be honest, there weren't too many places left for me to go.

'George [Francis], my trainer once said to me, "You're hardest fight is going to be when you've finished with boxing." He was right. Still, I took a good bit of time to consider it. I didn't know what I wanted to do. You know, there was pantomime and different shows, bits and pieces, but there was no overall plan. You just float. And panto was hardly the central thing in my life. It was just added on, definitely.

'The hardest time, probably, was when I was by myself, when I had time to think. I was used to being active over the years, with the goals being set for you. And, when that's taken away from you, that's not an easy thing to cope with. No roadwork, no training camp, no getting up at five in the morning. It was very difficult. But, then again, I did keep doing it, kept getting up to go training. But I had nothing to use the fitness on. I had all this pent-up energy still.'

In 1997, that energy erupted in an ugly way, and Laura was forced, after a domestic fracas, to take out a court order against her husband. Bruno was ordered to stay away from her and the three children. The girl from the ice rink, the smart-talking white girl who had heard the jibes behind her back about her relationship with a black man, who had looked after his money, had had enough. They divorced in 2001. Bruno was and remains devastated. He is talking to Laura again, although he doesn't elaborate on their split except to agree that, 'Yeah, the whole thing wasn't easy.'

Reports that Laura has wiped Bruno out financially are, says Warren, nonsense. 'He's got plenty of money left, whatever people wrote about his divorce settlement. Because he earned his money in a life-threatening job, the split wasn't 50-50.

'As for the future, I hope he is going to be OK. He made a lot of money with me, and a lot with Duff and Lawless. What I told him to do was not worry about trying to be a businessman - he's made a couple of bad investments - but just to be Frank Bruno Incorporated. Going around to schools and boys' clubs is what he's great at. And it will help him get better.'

Two years ago, George Francis, one of his closest friends, committed suicide and Bruno sank further into depression. Yet for all he's been through, Bruno remains resigned to whatever will happen next. His is a pared-down philosophy, born of his background, the values his mother gave him. 'Boxing is the toughest business in the world and I came through it. The fighting itself is hard enough but then there's all the shenanigans that go with it. But I guess it's all about putting bums on seats. From the beginning, I knew nothing else. I didn't have a skill, or a profession, nothing that I could really get involved in, to make enough money to be comfortable in life. Boxing is what I knew. But nothing in life comes easy, does it? Everyone has their problems, obstacles, whatever. You have to overcome them, so the sun does shine again. Mustn't grumble.'

Bruno is concerned, too, for Mike Tyson, the man who beat him twice and who has psychological problems of his own. Bruno and Tyson first met as teenagers in the Catskills in upstate New York, where the wild kid from Brooklyn was being handled by Cus D'Amato, a friend of Duff's. 'He was a young tearaway then, but he had a nice manner about him. He was a pleasant guy to be around. So it's hard to know what the real Tyson is like. He's been on a rollercoaster all his life, with a load of hangers-on around him and all manner of strange things happening to him.'

When Bruno was admitted to hospital, the Sun, the paper that announced his greatest triumph with the headline 'Arise, Sir Bruno!', demeaned him with the insensitive 'Bonkers Bruno Locked Up'.

Among those outraged by the headline was Marjorie Wallace, the founder and chief executive of mental health charity Sane. She protested to Rebekah Wade, editor of the Sun. 'The Sun came back the next day,' Wallace says, 'and asked me to do a 600-word reply. They called it "A Time To Heal". An appeal was started, raising £30,000, with big contributions from Richard Branson and Frank Warren. The Sun itself gave £10,000.'

Sane prepared a style guide for the paper to follow in writing about mental illness and Wallace says there has been a marked change in its coverage. 'Rebekah then asked to have lunch and said she wanted to have training with us. She came along with [her partner, the actor] Ross Kemp and spent a day with us. They took part in role plays, took suicide calls. And she is coming back. It's quite extraordinary the level of interest she has. I do believe it's genuine.'

Wallace's next call to an editor might be directed at Paul Dacre, whose Daily Mail headlined an interview with Bruno's eldest daughter Nicola last month 'Why I chose to have dad locked up'.

'Frank showed amazing willpower,' Wallace says, 'and he had a remarkable effect, too, when his story came out. We have a thousand callers a week and hundreds of them were saying how they felt released, liberated, because of Frank's story. Coming through a breakdown like Frank's, like any traumatic experience, it will stay with you. But by admitting he was ill, he confronted his problem the best way you can: honestly.'

Bruno says: 'My kids helped me get through it and so did my sister, and some other friends. I spoke to Mickey Duff just the other day. But the most important person is yourself. You've got to be strong enough to push yourself forward.'

Wallace says Bruno has offered to help Sane. So has Wade. Who would have predicted that years ago?

As we drive away from the London school, Frank looks tired. It has been both an uplifting and exhausting experience. Now he is running behind schedule to see his own kids and is anxious that we make up time.

Did he have enough to fill his days, I wondered? 'What do you do: sit at home and count the chandeliers? I had no idea, when I retired, what was in store for me for the rest of my life. Now I do. Just livin', you know? Trying to be happy. That's all you can do. And, definitely, my kids are an important part of my life.'

He hadn't told a joke all day. So he finishes with a suitably silly one-liner to lighten the mood. 'Life is not easy,' he says, staring out the car window. 'If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.'

Just then, you somehow knew he was going to make it.

· Frank Bruno will be running the Fitness First Sport Relief Mile on 10 July. For details, visit www.sportrelief.com